Okay, I'm going to do a better pitch for adding Diplomacy to the game as the better the pitch the more likely you are to implement it. Just saying implement a mix between MOO3 and Balance Of Power II may not be the most effective strategy.

Okay, there are six other empires in the galaxy. The green brigade and the yellow legionarres which are at war with each other. The purple agriculturalists. The orange scientists. The Gray Industrialists. The Pink Artisans.

These empires have no planets visible on the galaxy map because they are just too far away. In story terms, you have to jump through worm holes to get to each of the five sectors of the galaxy(green and yellow share the same sector hence why they are at war). So, trade and long term communication is possible but any sort of warfare is not practical.

The reason why I don't think there should be more than a 1v1 war is because adding more fronts makes the game take longer. Whereas, this way you get all the diplomatic benefits but not the downside of having a super empire and having to spend several turns mopping up the smaller empires.

Each empire has a relationship with all the other empires between -100 and 100.

Every 10 years of game time there is an intergalactic senate meeting where various bills can be passed. The number of votes everyone has depends on the population.

Bills can be passed like cease fire between blood legion and blue army, cease fire between green and yellow, pro-agricultural, pro-industry, etc.

How you vote affects your relations with other empires(The Pink Artisans like when you vote for peace, The Gray Industrialists like when you vote Pro-Industry) and the bills that are passed affect your empires economic system.

You can also trade with other empires. You can open trade routes which increases resources for both empires(You don't need to know that you're trading wool for fur, the player just needs to know that trade moves the supply curve to the right). You can send troops to both support the current government or troops to support any insurgencies.

When you hover your mouse over any empire it will show it's current population, it's political tendencies(pro-war), relationship with blood legion and blue army, and the strength of insurgent elements(and whether these rebels are pro-Blood Legion, pro-Blue Army, or both).

If you give too much military funding to government or insurgents or provide too much troops you can hurt your relationships with other empires.

You can also interact with the other governments via spies.

You can allocate resources to intelligence on the resource screen and then on the diplomatic screen you can determine how you spend these intelligence funds by percentages(counterintelligence, on blue, red, green gray, etc.)

You can check boxes next to the empires for what your spies do while they're there. The boxes include: Incite Rebellion, Damage Population Growth, Damage Resources, Damage Military, Damage Technology.

What needs to be done now to help prepare for this expansion pack:
-Other empires need to be able to gain and lose resources too
-It needs to be possible to add other empires

I've been playing a lot of 4X games recently and man I'm so glad this game is going to operate on a percentage system. Remembering where to send scout ships, colony ships, and military ships is a real pain.

As for scouting in Supernova II, scouting of course should be part of the percentage system. The Red Legion and Blue Army should both start with 50% of the galaxy. If it works like a 4X game where both races start with one little planet than it'll be more about the colony race and less about the board game portion. There shouldn't be so many starsystems that you won't be able to memorize them after a couple times at play.

Scouting in game terms should be sending scout ships through worm holes, you would randomly find new events and very rarely new viable colonies(If it was easy to find new solar systems to colonize why would the Blood Legion and Blue Army be at each other's throats?).

Since space is infinite there are always new things to find. What scouting is useful for is breaking stalemates(boom find a new colony and one race pulls ahead) and as a sort of general resource allacator for those who aren't sure where to put things in the percentile system(random events generate random amounts of a lot of the different in game resources).

Yes I find many 4X games too dispersive. There are too many things to remember that you go nuts
The game map, representing one single galaxy, will be about 800x800 pixels, so very small (you'll just need to scroll up and down a bit but not much). You can easily memorize it on each single match.
About the scouting, don't know - I want to emphasize the wargame aspect on the version 1.0, so for now I think I'll just finish it making all the percentages work in relationship of the battles themselves. I have the map almost working, next I'm doing some test battles and then the tech/build part.
Then I can have a better overview of what could be useful to add in the "percentage system" screen...

I had another idea for an expansion pack. In addition, to Supernova: Ground War, and Supernova: Cold War, how about Supernova: Civil War.

There would be different political factions within your empire. The factions would be like Workers, Warmongers, etc. Each faction would have a strength rating and happiness rating. As the strength rating of the faction increases certain bad things happen. At one threshold, the faction would go on strike decreasing productivity. At another, the faction would declare war and annex part of your empire.

You can change these thresholds by being different government types. In Democracy, the threshold might be lower. In Dictatorship, it would be higher.

In order, to please the factions you have to change the percentages. The worker faction might demand that you can't dedicate more than 10% of your resources torwards engineering or the unhappiness of that faction increases. The warmongers faction might demand that you have to use seventy percent of your resources torwards war.

You could also give resources to various factions to increase their happiness.

Hm very interesting indeed. Internal struggles, beside the normal fights. So each faction would "require" some values in resources allocation, and each one would have a strenght rating and also in particular stressful conditions a revolt could begin.
In this case would be great the combination with ground war, to fight your own troops in the civil war to sedate the rebellion
Yes definitely another good idea that will surely keep in mind for the future! even if the plan is to release Supernova, then finish TOD, and then start some expansion packs for both games (to appeal both wargame/startegy fans and roleplay fans).

Yes definitely another good idea that will surely keep in mind for the future! even if the plan is to release TOD, then finish Supernova, and then start some expansion packs for both games (to appeal both wargame/startegy fans and roleplay fans).

Haha well, the development is progressing good even for TOD, but honestly is much a complex game to program than Supernova. Also as I said another delaying factor is the integrated editor, even if I think in the end will be worth it!

I just played another 4X demo, Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition and it inspired me with some ideas for the game.

First, is that game balance is key. A game can have a lot of cool features but then you only want to play the game once to see all the cool features but not again because you used all the unbalanced tactics.

Maybe, there can be some sort of spreadsheet so that users can do some testing with various values to help test the resource allocation model.

Secondly, there shouldn't be a set way for you to manipulate the percentages all the time. There should be random events that increase/decrease the opportunity costs of certain "buildings"(not quite clear how you're doing this on the global level yet) and the opportunity cost of your percentage allocations. The tech tree could also be slightly random each game. Some techs may cost less or more. Some techs may be absent. This is of course, to prevent a user from just reading a FAQ and easily beating the game. Some events could also give certain ships bonuses. And there could be special squares on the game board to for the user to change his battle tactics.

Basically, it's very important for the game to be balanced. You are only one man. Therefore, you should employ some of your users so they can test the game via some spreadsheets to change some key values so they are better able to suggest changes.

Balance is so important in a game like this but why spend the time crunching numbers when you can spend the time coding?

Yes I have to think carefully how to do this. I have already the different battlefield types, so this can already influence a lot the outcome of the battles.
I agree with a random tech cost: this way there would be subset of tech but different costs. Like level 1 techs could be:
Pulse Laser: cost 10
Genetic Hospital: cost 20

etc, but in one match you could have the values completely swapped, or same, and so on. I will sum all tech values though and they must have same value. This way even if some costs less, other will cost more, and the final global research cost will be always the same in all match, it will just change the "research path".